Twitter was born on the phone. The shortcode was 40404 to text in a tweet, and the very 140 character limit was based on the 160 characters available for SMS so that you could use commands like ‘d username where the hell are you’ (why you wouldn’t just text in that situation, I don’t know). In fact, when the iPhone first arrived in 2007, it’s arguable that Twitter was one of the original killer apps, not least because it’s something that translated easily to the simplified web interface of a 480×320 screen. For the longest time (read: before they artificially limited access to the API), Twitter apps were the playground for new iOS developers; features as important as pull-to-refresh had their start in Twitter apps.
And all the while Facebook foundered. There were SMS features with Facebook, there was a rudimentary web interface and a succession of horrible apps (to this day, deleting the Facebook application from your iPhone is generally regarded as an easy way to recover 10% of your daily battery usage) and the abortive Facebook Phone (a cheap Android with Facebook as its US and horrible pricing). I’ve seen people refer to Twitter more times than I can count as “the friends who live in your phone”, something I’ve never ever heard said of Facebook.
And yet.
Facebook might have won in the long run because it went for people who didn’t have smartphones. While Twitter was on a growing mobile platform, Facebook was on the PCs of everyone’s mother. Everyone was using it at work. It’s been almost six years ago since I argued in this very space that Facebook was the new AOL and wanted to be, and sure enough, it’s now famous for AOL-caliber penetration and discourse. Facebook is shorthand in the Valley for “your racist aunt sending you Donald Trump graphics with lies Snopes debunked two years ago”, but out there in the wider world, Facebook may as well be the Internet.
And this is what Twitter is chasing, to its detriment. 140 character limit originally defined by SMS? About to go. The system of shorthand that evolved from within the user base itself (RTs, dot-cites, the very @ itself)? Now built-in, in a fashion that isn’t even consistent from website to mobile site to mobile app. Even the straightforward linear timeline is going away, no matter how much Jack Dorsey protests, because just giving you your own personal firehose in order is less ad-friendly than mining the stream and percolating up things that make for better traffic and ad impressions, never mind the loss of a linear narrative.
Twitter is brilliant in its simplicity, because it was a dumb app and a dumb protocol. I described it at the dawn of time as “blast texting” and given that SMS/iMessage is my primary social network these days, that isn’t far wrong. I’ve been making use of it since 2007 and in the simplest form, with the fewest followed people, it’s quite handy (even if my more populated accounts always seem to make things worse at some level; the Vanderbilt-related one…but that’s another story for another time). But the more they make it like Facebook, which I abjured the regular use of years ago, the less valuable it becomes. Once again, not everything has to be the market leader, but in Silly Con Valley in 2016, nobody knows how to do anything else.
And so Twitter chases the least common denominator, while I try to figure out how to persuade my friends to consider alpha.net or Peach.